


Psi Corps Writes Its Own Looney Tunes Cartoons

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [141]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms, Looney Tunes
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Children, Essays, Except in canon it's not AU, Fix-It, Gen, Growing up in the cadre system, Looney Tunes AU, Looney Tunes References, Psi Corps, Telepath culture, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-20 08:53:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16552742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Yes, this is canon.Thanks to Reeves_Dove for prompting me to talk about this!





	Psi Corps Writes Its Own Looney Tunes Cartoons

**Author's Note:**

> The prologue of _Behind the Gloves_ is [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10153487) \- please read!
> 
> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

I’ve written a few essays and stories that show or discuss how the Corps produces its own vids for children. Some such vids are also watched by normal children as well as children in the Corps (e.g. Bester's favorite show as a child, “John Trakker”), and some vids are seen only in the Corps. I'd made up some examples of the latter, because I didn't realize there was canon example.

People are a lot less likely to notice (and think to talk about) things that are _right_ , that are where they should be, compared to things that are wrong or misplaced. A blue banana sticks out, but a yellow one is just another yellow banana.

Here, I completely didn’t catch a direct canon reference to one such vid (seen only in the Corps) until a reader pointed it out to me a few days ago. It was right, so I didn't see it.

**Please feel free to ask me about the "yellow bananas." I may have missed them entirely as interesting things to talk about.**

Here, the "yellow banana" is that the Corps has written and animated its own version of _Looney Tunes_ , to bring the cartoons more in line with their cultural values. Here we have a quote from Deadly Relations, p. 100, when Bester is talking to his mentor, Sandoval Bey, as they're looking for a girl who has run away from school, and fallen into the hands of traffickers:

          "So it's possible I might have established some link with her?"

          "I wouldn't count on it. It's more likely closure - your mind putting things together from a number of facts and sensations. Your memory of her signature, the traces of her left in this room, the details you know about her - the Human mind is a strange machine, even without telepathy. The main thing, Mr. Bester, is that it _works_. 'Why' is usually a fine question to ask, but in this case-" He stopped, smiling. "Have you ever seen the animated vids?"

          "Yes. I used to like _Roadrunner_."

          "Hmm - the roadrunner was the Blip, right? And the coyote, the Psi Cop?"

          "Yes, sir. The roadrunner was clever, but he always got caught in the end."

          "Did he ever run off of a cliff, and not know it? Just hang there in the air until he realized that he wasn't standing on anything?"

          "Yes, sir. That's when he would fall."

          "Sometimes our abilities are like that. Convince yourself that something shouldn't work, and sometimes it doesn't."

I mentioned this piece here in [this essay](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12272781) about how telepathy works (and how "it's complicated"), and one reader noticed the yellow banana.

          _Reader: "Hm - "the Roadrunner always got caught in the end"? I suspect someone rewrote how those cartoons go! (But then, they would have to if Coyote is supposed to be an analogue for the Psi Cop, wouldn't they? It wouldn't do to have a cartoon out there, spreading the idea that rogues can just escape every time, or that the Psi Cops are incompetent...)"_

So, yes. On a meta level, Warner Brothers owns all the copyrights or something, so they get to mix things up and make one universe fiction in the other, and that's how come Garibaldi likes Daffy Duck and has a picture of him on the wing of his Starfury.

But then things get funkier when we consider that the version of Looney Tunes that normals watch as children in that world is different from the version that telepaths watch.

          Me, to the reader: "Yeah, that's how the line from canon goes. It's an interesting point because those cartoons do come up elsewhere in canon (Garibaldi is a fan, I remember this). I think that the version of the cartoons that kids in the Corps watch is a little different from the version normals watch. ... If you've read my other posts, kids in the Corps are exposed only to material that supports the values of the Corps. So it makes sense that they would produce their own versions of kids' cartoons, rather than making everything from scratch all the time. So the message here is that "Blips are stupid and get caught," and more generally, "selfish behavior is foolish and always ends badly for you." Showing the cartoon as originally written would be really confusing."

Many children's stories in the Corps have the message that "selfish behavior is foolish and always ends badly for you." And every small child knows "Blips are Blips because they are selfish (and stupid)." So the Corps has rewritten and redrawn the cartoons to tell different stories, here, with the coyote _**explicitly**_ dressed as a Psi Cop, and the roadrunner always getting caught after having done something stupid.

...Now I want to show you more examples of Corps' versions of normal vids. ^_^


End file.
